“Come, let me bless you my children,” and the Major’s wife slipped a hand into one hand of each, and drew them closer. Robert’s eyes lit up; his brave mouth was smiling quietly, while dimples broke out on Cherokee’s face.
“I trust the dark is all behind, the light before, and that you are at the threshold of a great, enduring happiness—but remember that Time will touch you as your joy has done, but his fingers will weigh more heavily—it is then that you must cling all the closer.”
CHAPTER XII. SUNLIGHT.
The marriage was to be celebrated in two weeks. Cherokee had too much common sense to wish an elaborate wedding, when it would necessitate more means than she possessed.
The Major and his wife, who was the personification of lovable good nature, considered together, and graciously agreed to extend to Robert, for these two weeks, the hospitality of their roof. What a sweetly good wife the Major had! The graces of her person corresponded to the graces of her mind. The beauty of her character found a fitting symbol in the sweet, gentle face—the refined, expressive mouth, that gave out wise counsel to Cherokee, in whom she felt so deep an interest.
Cherokee had the dimmest memory of her mother, whom she lost when she was a child in words of three letters, frocks to her knees, infantine socks, and little shoes fastened with two straps and a button. The Major’s wife was so full of charity and tenderness that she did her best to compensate for the unhappy want of a mother. She now gave her assistance in every particular relating to the preliminaries of the wedding.
There is an old saying that “honest work is prayer.” If thus reckoned, there was a deal of praying at Ashland now. At the door, most times, was a large carriage, of the kind which the Major used to call a barouche, with an immense pair of iron-gray horses to it, and on the box was a negro coachman, ready at a moment’s notice to let down the steps, open and close the door, clamber up to his seat, and set off at a brisk pace along down a winding avenue of laurels, to town.
As for Robert, it was the union of inspiration and rest that made the days so wholesome and unique. It was agreed that he and the Major should be no care to the busy ones; they were to find their own entertainments. One or two days had been passed in hunting expeditions. They had bagged quail until the artist fancied himself a great success as a huntsman. Then there were morning strolls where he could take his thoughts and ease in the fulness of all the falling beauty and grandeur of the season. Light winds strewed his way broadcast with leaves—leaves that were saturated, steeped, drunken with color. What a blessed privilege for a man with artistic tastes. There was nothing second-rate about here. The air, as well as the leaves, was permeated, soaked through and through, with sunlight—quivering, brilliant, radiant; sunlight that blazes from out a sky of pearl, opal and sapphire; sunlight that drenched historic “Ashland” with liquid amber, kissed every fair thing awake, and soothed every shadow; sunlight that caresses and does not scorch, that dazzles and does not blind.